Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Buffy the Vampire Slayer turned the tables on the ‘teen girl as victim’ notion and set a new standard for strong female characters. In the last part of our interview with Joss Whedon he talks about why that was important to him and how the themes of female power play out in the new Buffy comics from Dark Horse. Oh, and he talks about Angel too...

GEEKMONTHLY.COM: Years ago you told me that when you created Buffy it was your answer to the blonde bimbo being killed in the alley by the monster, instead kicking the monster’s ass. Is this new Buffy, in 2007, a response to something else? Does she have a different message?

JOSS WHEDON: In a way, it’s a larger answer to the same question. And the question is, why are people afraid of powerful women? Why is misogyny streaking through every single culture? Why is the world like that? The world is not as it should be, and Buffy has now created a bunch of people with enormous power who kind of realize that. And the people who realize they realize that are not pleased about it. She’s answering the question that I answered with Buffy; she’s confronting it directly and on a global scale. Not that it starts with her picketing and that she’s become activist girl. She’s still fighting demons, but she’s starting to realize that there is more wrong with the world than just a bunch of monsters.

GEEKMONTHLY.COM: Is that a message you think you’ll be able to get through to people within the trappings of the comic?

buffy3m.JPGJOSS: You know, I found that pretty much everything I tried to get through on the show got through way more than I thought it was going to. I was trying to hide all that metaphor stuff, and then everyone was, like, “Love the metaphor stuff.” Ultimately if she is strong, flawed and decent, then people will relate to her and that in itself is the only statement that I really need to make. Luckily there’s more than that to play with when you have a world filled with Slayers. What would that be like for them and other people, too?

GEEKMONTHLY.COM: Have the characters evolved from the last time we’ve seen them?

JOSS: Some of them and some of them not so much. Such is life.

GEEKMONTHY.COM: I read your comments about how you’re going to use Spike and Angel sparingly for the big moments, but does the Angel deal with IDW interfere at all with the use of those characters or any of the characters from Angel?

JOSS: It’s very simply that I feel that IDW is doing a good job, working hard and we shouldn’t confuse readers or take business away from them. They took the license and ran with it. Legally I could use anybody I want to, but I feel like, in the way the shows became their own universes, it makes sense for the comics to do the same. I won’t be using the ancillary characters from Angel unless I absolutely think that nobody else can fit this bill. Spike and Angel I will definitely use, but sparingly. But I would do that anyway. You don’t want to use it up by having Spike standing around in the background of every frame. He means so much to Buffy, so did Angel, that you want to save them for the big hits. It’s like Galactus. If he showed up every week, you’d be like, “I don’t think you’re gong to eat the world. I think the Silver Surfer is going to betray you or Reed is going to come up with a device. So why don’t you take your big pointy hat and get the f*** out of here?”

GEEKMONTHLY.COM: Maybe you could do a crossover with IDW like you used to do with the shows.

JOSS: You know what? Stranger things have happened?